Tag Archives | Vampires

Villagers in Serbia are terrified of the alleged return of Sava Savonovic, the local vampire, reports Dusan Stojanovic for AP:

Get your garlic, crosses and stakes ready: a bloodsucking vampire is on the loose.
Or so say villagers in the tiny western Serbian hamlet of Zarozje, nestled between lush green mountain slopes and spooky thick forests. They say rumors that a legendary vampire ghost has awakened are spreading fear - and a potential tourist opportunity - through the remote village.
A local council warned villagers to put garlic in their pockets and place wooden crosses in their rooms to ward off vampires, although it appeared designed more to attract visitors to the impoverished region bordering Bosnia.
Many of the villagers are aware that Sava Savanovic, Serbia's most famous vampire, is...

The discovery of a skeleton found with metal spikes through its shoulders, heart and ankles, dating from 550-700AD and buried in the ancient minster town of Southwell, Notts, is detailed in a new report. It is believed to be a ‘deviant burial’, where people considered the ‘dangerous dead’, such as vampires, were interred to prevent them rising from their graves to plague the living.

The skeleton was found by archaeologist Charles Daniels during the original investigation of the site in Church Street in the town 1959, which revealed Roman remains.

John Lock, chairman of Southwell Archaeology, said the body was one of a handful of such burials to be found in the UK. Mr Lock said no one could be sure why the body was staked in the way it was: “People would have a very strong view that this was somebody who, for whatever reason, they had a reason to fear and needed to ensure that this person did not come back.”

David Icke’s theory that the British royals stay youthful by feeding on the blood of children gains a shred of supporting evidence, via Digital Journal:

Links have been discovered between the British Royal Family and Vlad the Impaler. Romania is now exploiting this in an attempt to lure tourists to Transylvania — the Romanian National Tourist Office has released brochures and a promotional video, claiming the fame of the link between Count Dracula and British Royalty.

In the tourism video, Prince Charles “traces his ancestry back to Romania’s dark and distant past,” speaking of his kinship with the historical Dracula – Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler. The Prince also said that in a book published in 1982 by Sir Iain Moncreiffe he is listed as a great grandson 16 times removed to Vlad Tepes.

Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula from his novel is based on Vlad Tepes, who was a 15th century ruler of the Wallachian Kingdom notorious for his blood thirsty campaigns against the Ottomans, and his own people, with victims estimated in the tens of thousands.

Via Cryptomundo: a recent issue of corporate publication Saudi Aramco Worldincludes a Halloween-appropriate offering for its readers: a feature on monsters of Mesopotamia and their similarities to traditional Western favorites, like vampires, werewolves and zombies. Here’s a snip:

A particularly vivid description of a group of thoroughly evil, vampire-like utukku known as the Seven Spirits appears in a 3000-year-old Assyrian cuneiform incantation:

Seven are they! Knowing no care, They grind the land like corn; Knowing no mercy, They rage against mankind; They spill their blood like rain, Devouring their flesh [and] sucking their veins…. They are demons full of violence, Ceaselessly devouring blood.

In a lot of ways, 1972’s cryptid horror film The Legend of Boggy Creek was a ground-breaker: a pseudo docudrama distributed by its producer and director Charles Pierce (who even sang the film’s theme song), it is considered by some people to have been one of the first indie films. Boggy Creek featured interviews with men and women who had encountered the “creature”, a Bigfoot-like monster supposed to lurk in the wilds of Arkansas. That the witnesses were amateur actors recruited from the small town in which the zero-budget movie was filmed actually filmed brought the movie a scrappy sort of authenticity. It was a scary movie, and a lot of fun, but what some of the film’s drive-in audience may not have known was that it the movie was inspired by (reputedly) true events.

Stories of a Bigfoot-like cryptid wandering the woods of Fouke, Arkansas started circulating in 1971 after local residents Bobby and Elizabeth Ford reported that a monster had attacked their home late at night on May 2.… Read the rest

As recently as one hundred years ago, in parts of the Eastern European countryside, fear of vampires ran so high that corpses had iron stakes driven through their hearts. One wonders what events provoked such a practice. Via the Washington Post:

Bulgarian archaeologists say they have unearthed centuries-old skeletons pinned down through their chests with iron rods – a practice believed to stop the dead from becoming vampires to feast on the blood of the living.

According to Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National History Museum in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, two skeletons from the Middle Ages were found in such a state last weekend near the Black Sea town of Sozopol. He said Tuesday that corpses were regularly treated in such a way before being buried in some parts of Bulgaria, even until the beginning of the last century.

Is it not more sensible to worship a god that [man], himself, has created, in accordance with his own emotional needs—one that best represents the very carnal and physical being that has the idea-power to invent a god in the first place?

If man insists on externalizing his own true self in the form of “God,” then why fear his true self, in fearing “God,”—why praise his true self in praising “God,”—why remain externalized from “God” IN ORDER TO ENGAGE IN RITUAL AND RELIGIOUS CEREMONY IN HIS NAME?

—Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible

Vampyre Magick has many elements, ranging from small rituals and ceremonies, which are conducted every day, to the secretive rituals of the Synod. Within Strigoi Vii Magick we know belief is a tool, so we always focus on the positive and remain aware of the negatives. This attitude truly brings an empowering spirit to workings.… Read the rest

The fictional vampire may have made his debut at the Algonquin Round Table, but he flourished alongside the cave-dwelling cannibals and homicidal maniacs who introduced the British working class to the magic of reading. The 1845-1847 penny dreadful Varney the Vampire was penned by none other than James Malcolm Rymer, who created the character Sweeney Todd. Victorian Gothic writes:

James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire has been described as the worst book of the 19th century. Introduced in 1845, the completed serial consists of over 600,000 words of tedious dialog, aimlessly meandering storylines, maddening repetition, and enough kernels of genius to consistently inspire horror fiction into the present day. Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Russell T. Davies and Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau are just some of the writers and filmmakers who have been indebted to concepts originated in the pages of Varney, making it easily the most influential vampire story that nobody reads.

The first full-length work of vampire fiction, Varney appeared in the penny press some 36 years after the original short story sketches by Lord Byron and John William Polidori, and decades before J.

Two infamous Swedish murderers, the “Skara Cannibal” and the “Vampire Woman,” hope to get married, according to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper. The couple met at their high-security psychiatric ward in eastern Sweden, the paper said, and flirted over Internet chat rooms.

Isakin Jonsson, known as the ”Skara Cannibal,” was convicted in March 2011 of killing of his girlfriend, Helle Christensen, a mother of five, Expressen said. After stabbing her to death and cutting off body parts, he ate some of them.

Gustafsson was convicted in 2010 of the stabbing death of a father of four in Stockholm, the paper said. She wrote chilling lyrics on her blog about killing people and posted pictures of herself dressed as a vampire with bloody lips.